I am sure it is more than obvious why multiplayer itself is popular, so I won't go into that. But I must ask, why shooters? Why are shooters the undisputed king of multiplayer, overtaking racing, fighting, sports, and everything in between? It turns out this question is not all that hard to answer, though I guarantee it will make you think.

Beginning with the most obvious factor, shooters are accessible. They are accessible like no other genre could hope to be. There is plenty of strategy required to play well, but it is amazingly easy for anyone to jump in and at least grab the basic mechanics. All you have to do is point and shoot. Because part of the point here is to make comparisons, let us consider other multiplayer-centric genres. You can wing it through a fighter, but you at least need to learn timing if not combos and other moves. Anyone can hit the accelerator in a car, but few can drive well at high speeds. I don't even have to get into all the rules one has to know to jump into any sport. So yes, I think we can agree that shooters have an ease of use that far surpasses any other genre. It certainly doesn't hurt that these mechanics stay the same across games and make it easy to jump between them, something that can rarely be said elsewhere.

EDIT: Ok, so a lot of you are taking issue with the accessibility argument, and that's fair. But note I didn't say that shooters were easy to learn, just easier than something like a fighting game or a sports game. Let's move on; this opening point is the least important one.

What should also be quite obvious is that shooters provide the best chance to actually work as a team. You can have a team in a fighter, but you are still (almost) always fighting one-on-one. You can have a team in a racing game, but it just isn't the same. You don't have the potential for the same second-to-second teamwork as in a shooter. Sports games obviously have teams, but at best you can play two-on-two. There is teamwork there, but not nearly on the same level, as you don't even directly control the whole team. Your racing team may have to coordinate to take someone off the road, but your shooter team has to coordinate to keep the enemies distracted in front while others sneak up back, throw cover, lay down suppressing fire, and so on. In practice you do not often find such teamwork, but at least the potential is there.

A few other things are also worth at least mentioning in passing. It is difficult to overlook the endless unlockables that have become a staple of shooters, allowing you to accomplish something no matter how badly you may come out in the end. With that comes the endless customization, that not only lets you build your own personal way of playing, it lets you prove that your strategies are better than those of others. On top of all that, it turns out that variety is the true king, not content. There may be many different racing disciplines, but can that hope to compare to the massive list of game types that shooters have spawned from their simple mechanics? Those 8 (or so) basic game types balloon into an infinite number when you add objective-switching modes and all of Halo's ideas into the mix. Would a fighting game have ever come up with something as cool and different as rocket baseball? I didn't think so.

Now as for the real reason shooters are king, the base psychological reasons that you may not even think about, this comes in two parts. The first part is the lack of a need to worry about failure. You could screw up horribly, make the biggest mistake of your life, and still the absolute worst thing that can happen is that you die. Yet death, the worst thing that can happen, is meaningless in a shooter, at worst making you wait 3 seconds and moving you across the map. Considering you start again with all your ammo and equipment, dying can often leave you in a better position than before. Contrast this to a race, where a single little mistake could send you flying off the track and out of the race entirely. Or a fight, where one split-second decision could end in your being juggled to death. Or a sport, where one mistake could easily cost you the game. Only in a shooter can you play as if your mistakes do not matter, because they really don't. I'm sure I would have a hard time explaining this to the millions screaming in their headsets at every death, but it's true. Mistakes very rarely come back to haunt you in a shooter, and they are even less likely to spell the end of a match.

The second part is even more important, and builds off the first. Consider the ratio of glory to defeat that a shooter represents. In the other multiplayer genres discussed, you only really win when the match is over. In a shooter however, you can win all the time. There are countless instances for personal glory, as every kill feels like a win. In another genre you can only either win or lose in the end; only in a shooter can you lose yet feel like a winner, having come out with more kills than deaths. Frankly, you can even feel like you are winning with more deaths than kills. Every one of those kills meant something, was a personal win, while we have established that death is all but meaningless. It can be argued that death is more memorable because it is unexpected, explaining all the rage usually induced by it, but that does not seem to be the case for many. So many millions of people don't mind throwing themselves at a brick wall, knowing that it will all be worth it once they do get that kill.

After all, that is just part of war. You might lose a lot of men taking that position, but taking it is still a victory. War means a lot of losses, things that can be overlooked considering the wins they manage to buy. A shooter makes things even more simple, virtually taking losses out of the question entirely. A virtual loss is nothing, but a virtual win is still a win. "It's just a game", and you can brag about all those wins without ever bringing up the losses. Can any other type of game hope to provide the same? This is why shooters are so appealing. You can lose battle after battle, but all it takes is some small amount of personal glory to win the war.

Michael Taylor is a struggling lawyer who insists on never giving up his love for games. He has been writing about them for five years now, making it his mission to challenge every longstanding and pervasive opinion within the industry. You can check him out on Facebook, and he is always available for chatting through Skype (search for atobe-sama).